


A Thief in the Night

by Maiden_of_Asgard



Category: Loki - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Norse Religion & Lore, Dom Loki (Marvel), Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, F/M, Historical Fantasy, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Jötnar | Jotuns | Frost Giants (Norse Religion & Lore), Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, Loki Silvertongue, Loss of Virginity, Miðgarðr | Midgard, Slavery, Smut, The Little Ice Age, Thralldom, Trickster Loki (Marvel), Viking Culture, Vikings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 03:43:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13966617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_Asgard/pseuds/Maiden_of_Asgard
Summary: Straying too far from the safety of her master's longhouse one cold, snowy night, a slave-girl falls prey to a creature from legend.An AU set during the Viking Age.





	A Thief in the Night

The wind whistled outside, swift and fierce, and the girl originally assumed that it was the worsening of the storm that had caused her to wake from exhausted, dreamless slumber. But no, she realized, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as one of the sheep butted his nose against the side of her head, it was not the wind. There was something _else_ in the air that she could not entirely place, an apprehensive sort of _buzzing_ hovering just around the edge of her senses. The rest of the livestock must have felt it, too, for they all moved about the confined space restlessly, tails twitching.

She shoved the sheep aside, rising reluctantly to peer around the wattle wall that separated her warm little sanctuary from the rest of the longhouse. Nothing seemed amiss - aside from the nearly-dead fire in the hearth, and she sighed, cursing her luck; there _should_ have been more firewood left near the hearth, but there _wasn’t_ , and if the mistress happened to wake, she would almost certainly use it as an excuse for a beating. The mistress loved to find excuses for beatings, and the girl was her favorite target.

Moving quietly through the central hall as the deep breaths and snores of the household rumbled around her, the girl approached the door, feeling the temperature drop with every step that she took, already regretting the decision to go outside and fetch more wood in lieu of punishment. Punishment _might_ actually be preferable to facing the cold of winter, the chill that seemed to sink into her very bones.

She wrapped her thin blanket around her shoulders and head as a sort of makeshift hood, covering her close-cropped, bronze-colored hair; a headscarf was a luxury not typically afforded to her, as they were usually reserved for married freewomen, but in the dark of the night, it hardly mattered.

Snow was piling up quickly against the walls of the longhouse, and she grit her teeth in discomfort as she forced herself to step outside, slogging through as she made her way around to the back where the extra firewood was kept stacked under a lean-to. The nagging sensation of something unusual continued to prick at her senses, and she turned her head to glance up the hill, where the jarl’s longhouse sat lording over them all, barely visible in the dim moonlight. She realized then that the place was eerily still, no smoke filtering through the roof.

Should she wake the master, or one of the other thralls? No, she decided, it was likely nothing, and she did not wish to face the master’s wrath if she woke him for no good reason. Instead, she altered her course, slowly trudging up the hill to investigate, a profound sense of curiosity overriding her desire to return to her sleeping-corner. She expected to be hailed by a thrall standing guard out in the freezing cold as she drew near, but there was no one to be seen, and the buzzing sense of apprehension increased.

The door to the longhouse was ajar and covered in a thin sheen of ice, snow beginning to drift inside the opening, and the girl halted, alarms suddenly ringing in her mind. Something _was_ wrong, and she should turn and flee, should race back down the hill and rouse the village at once. But strangely, she found that she could not turn away, something instinctual urging her to creep forward and peer around the lintel into the darkness beyond.

Someone - or some _thing_ \- stood by the dying embers of the hearth, though she could make out nothing but shadow - a tall shadow, and she took a step back in fear, letting out a tiny gasp of pain as one of the frozen splinters of the doorframe scraped against her cheek. The shadow by the fire turned suddenly at the sound, red eyes reflecting the dying flames as they found her and widened slightly. She spun on her heel and ran.

Or rather, she _tried_ to run, for her feet caught on something, launching her face-first into the snow, pinpricks of pain racing through her legs. She struggled to stand, ignoring the cold sting of the snow against her bare hands as she pushed herself to her knees, but her legs remained locked in place. They were _frozen,_ she realized with horror, _literally_ encased in ice from the knee down.

Boots appeared in front of her eyes in the same moment that fingers dug into her hair, yanking her head back painfully. Her eyes watered from the burning in her scalp and the stinging in her legs and from fear itself, blurring and distorting the image of the fearsome creature in front of her. She blinked and the creature’s terrifying smile came into focus, and she quickly squeezed them closed again, a whimper escaping from deep within her throat.

 _“Poor mortal,”_ he crooned in a voice surprisingly warm and smooth, his grip tightening slightly. “Caught out in the cold, alone and afraid. Open your eyes.”

Too frightened to disobey, she did as he said. The being before her looked much like a man in form, with high, smooth cheeks and dark, wavy hair, but his skin was a dusky sort of blue, thin, barely-noticable ridges and grooves tracing patterns across his forehead and down his neck and bare chest, disappearing beneath thin leather trousers. More frightening than any of that were his eyes, an eerie shade of red that sparkled with amusement at her distress.

“What is the matter, little one?” he asked, baring his bright white teeth as he laughed. “Have you never seen a Jötunn before?”

 _A Frost Giant,_ she thought, quaking as her limbs grew numb. He looked nothing like the Frost Giants from the stories told around the fire at night. In fact, he looked like nothing she ever could have imagined. “No,” she whispered, the chill seeping into her lungs.

“You will die like this, won’t you?” he mused, lifting his free hand to trail along the slave-collar at her neck, her exposed skin smarting and stinging at his touch. “The mortals of Midgard have such _frail_ skin. If I leave you here, you will succumb rather quickly.” The fingers in her hair suddenly grew warm, and she gaped in shock as a wave of green light trailed up his arm and across his chest and face, leaving his skin pale and smooth in its wake. “Fortunately for you, I find myself in a rather good mood.”

The heavy weight around her legs melted away, and the Frost Giant-turned-man stood abruptly, hauling her to her feet and dragging her back towards the longhouse, her muscles and her mind screaming in protest. “Please,” she begged, struggling to keep up with his long strides in order to alleviate some of the tension against her scalp, “please, do not eat me.”

At her tearful plea, the creature halted just outside the doorway, looking back at her with a delighted grin. “What a _delicious_ idea,” he said, and then she was yanked into the darkness.

It was too dim inside to make out much of anything, but there was no movement inside the longhouse, and that alone was unsettling enough. “What did you do?” she managed to ask as he led her closer to the hearth, her teeth chattering; it was nearly as cold inside as it was out in the storm.

“Your lord had something I desired,” he said. “I killed him, and I took it. Do _you_ have anything I might desire, girl?”

“No!” she cried, tugging against his grip, “I have nothing, I swear it!”

“Not true. You have your life, and your soft little mortal body.”

So, then, she was going to be devoured, just like the stories had said. She closed her eyes, bracing herself; perhaps if she met death bravely, the gods would grant her a pleasant afterlife. “Kill me quickly, then.”

Something warm and wet traced along her jugular, and she realized that it was his tongue. “I prefer to savor,” he murmured against her neck, and she felt a strange sort of heat curl through her as his teeth sank into her skin. A strangled gasp escaped her at the unfamiliar sensation, she opened her eyes to find him staring down at her, his lip curling in a pleased smirk.

He leaned over to toss a few new logs onto the embers of the fire, though his hold on her hair did not abate, and the motion threw her terribly off-balance. Flames burst into life as if by magic, and she squinted around the hall to find… nothing. There was no sign of the occupants of the longhouse - not even bodies. “I am Loki, son of Laufey, Prince of Jötunheim,” he informed her, his fingers moving to trace against the spot right above her collar that his lips had so recently occupied. “And you are a slave, aren’t you? Do you have a name, little ambátt?”

She blinked up at him in confusion. “Kolla,” she said. It was not much of a name, but it was all she’d ever had.

His fingers slid around her throat, though he _did_ finally release his painful grip on her hair. “Shall I set you free?” he asked, red eyes burning into her as her heart pounded.

“I- I have nowhere to go,” she replied, shivering as his thumb pressed into the hollow of her neck.

“So much _fear_ in you,” the creature sighed, bending to press his nose to the spot just behind her jaw where her pulse pounded. “I can smell it.” Warm lips found her skin once again, a sharp contrast to the vicious bite she’d been expecting him to deliver, and she whimpered. The Jötunn laughed, his hands falling to her hips to bunch in the coarse woolen fabric of her shift, dragging it up slowly to expose her knees and her thighs, then apparently growing too impatient, he yanked it over her head.

In that split second, the girl chose to flee, deciding that freezing to death would be a much preferable fate to being torn to pieces by a monster. She expected her end to be sudden, anticipated the pain of the ice as it would encase her entire body this time, for no doubt the creature would be too enraged to do anything but kill her quickly.

Instead, an arm caught her about the waist like an iron bar, dragging her back against a warm chest. Her short, unkempt hair seemed to amuse him, and he ran his fingers through it absentmindedly as he crushed her to him, leaning to whisper in her ear. “Did you mean to escape me in nothing but your stockings and boots?” he asked, clearly entertained. “Very bold, and _very_ foolish.”

He abandoned her hair in favor of caressing her breasts, an unexpectedly pleasant sensation that caused her breathing to hitch; she had been rudely groped by one of the master’s bondsman before, and it had been painful and humiliating, but _this…_ this sent heat racing across her sensitive skin, and she wondered if she was being bespelled.

She was momentarily lifted off of her feet as he turned, hauling her back to the hearth and bending her over one of tables that stood nearby, pressing her against the rough wood with a hand about the back of her neck. His other hand trailed slowly down her spine, coming to rest on the swell of her hip, and suddenly the burning cold returned, hard fingers digging into her soft flesh. Crying out in protest, she squirmed beneath him, and the creature made an interested sort of hum as his now-warm hand stroked and soothed the hurt.

“Pity,” he remarked, but she did not have a chance to wonder what he meant by it, for his fingers suddenly found their way between her thighs, exploring with surprising gentleness. She closed her eyes and clung to the sides of the tabletop for dear life, her terror warring with the strange, fiery sense of anticipation that seemed to be coursing through her veins and pooling between her legs.

When he roughly pressed his fingers inside of her, she whined in discomfort, and the Jötunn withdrew, teasing the backs of her thighs with damp fingertips. The girl turned crimson in shame and confusion as her back arched slightly, her body seeming to seek out his touch of its own accord.

“You are untouched, aren’t you?” he asked, and though he kept her pressed firmly against the table where she could not see his face, she could hear the laughter in his voice. “How strange. I thought Midgardian men made more liberal use of their slave-women.”

 _They do,_ she thought. If not for her mistress’s keen eye and sharp tongue, the master would have had his way with her years ago; instead, the master jealously kept other men away from her, and the mistress forestalled the master, in what had become a grim sort of dance leading to an inescapable eventuality.

The Jötunn gripped her hips and rolled her onto her back, smoothing his hand down her neck and chest as he loomed over her, watching in fascination as goosebumps appeared on her skin, his eyes now a dark crimson. “Do not fear the cold, little ambátt. I will make you warm.”

He sank to his knees at the end of the table, and the girl pushed herself up on her forearms to follow his movements, but her head fell back against the table with a sharp thud as his mouth found her center. His snicker was muted, but she could _feel_ it, and she groaned, beginning to feel slightly delirious at the rush of excitement it provoked. The sound must’ve encouraged him, for he attacked with greater enthusiasm, sliding her thighs over his shoulders.

 _What is happening?_ she wondered, dazed, unfocused eyes turned towards the smoky rafters above. This… this was _not_ the way of a man with a woman, she was nearly certain of it; living in such close quarters in the longhouse, she had overseen an unfortunate amount of rutting, and she had _never_ seen anything like what he was doing to her now.

Her fingers found their way into his hair before she’d realized what she was doing, and the Jötunn grunted his approval, turning his head slightly to graze his teeth against her inner thigh. Muscles shaking, she tugged on his hair, trying to get him to continue whatever it was he was doing to her, increasingly needing something she could not entirely explain.

After what was either a few short moments or an eternity, he broke away from her grasp and stood, wiping his mouth on his forearm as he crowded into her field of vision with a look that she could only describe as _wicked._ The girl was torn between begging the creature to spare her life and begging him to continue touching her. Instead, she kept her mouth shut, a soft, mortifyingly-needy whine escaping her throat as he pulled her to her feet and gave her a light push towards the door.

“Go on,” he purred from somewhere just behind her shoulder. “Run, girl. I will not stop you.”

Frozen in confusion, she stared at the doorway in the distance. Was it a test? Or a game, like a cat playing with a mouse, letting it flee only to snatch it back into his claws? More pressingly, the burning in her veins and the ache between her thighs had reached a fever pitch, and she feared that he had enchanted her, cursed her with some fearsome magic that would surely drive her mad. “Please,” she said, her voice coming out surprisingly raspy, “I -“

“That is what I thought,” the Jötunn said triumphantly, and before she could blink, she was staring at his pale, muscular back as he tossed her over his shoulder and hauled her to the back of the longhouse as if she were a sack of grain. Her world spun as he flung her onto something soft - a bed, she realized. She’d never been on a bed before, but now she understood the appeal.

A nagging sense of worry reminded her that it was the middle of the night, and the only reason that the bed’s rightful occupant, and indeed, all of the other occupants of the jarl’s longhouse, were absent was due to this creature called Loki killing and vanishing them away somewhere. Something told her that a similar fate awaited her, once he was finished with her, and she shuddered.

She did not have much of an opportunity to contemplate her impending demise, however, for he was on top of her almost instantly, pressing her wrists against the bed and kissing her neck. _Why_ he seemed so fond of her neck, she did not understand, but it felt _good,_ and so she inclined her head to allow him better access.

He settled himself between her legs, hard and heavy, the weight of his form crushing her into the softness of the bed beneath her; she let out a groan as he ground against her, shocked to discover that she somehow needed him to be even _closer._

Taking a brief respite from his assault on her neck, he pressed his cheek against hers. The creature’s composure seemed to have been slightly unsettled at last, for his breath came out in soft pants, tickling against the shell of her ear. “My name is Loki,” he told her once again, leaning back slightly to stare into her eyes. “Say my name.”

The girl licked her lips, dry and cracked from the cold, and tried to speak, but her voice came out only as the faintest of whispers. His crimson eyes, now fixated on her mouth, seemed to grow darker still. “Again,” he ordered. “Louder.”

_“Loki.”_

He bared his teeth in what she sincerely _hoped_ was triumph, for it reminded her far more of the snarl of a wolf, lunging forward to deliver the final blow. The crushing grip on one of her wrists disappeared, and he shifted his weight, reaching between them, and it took her slightly-foggy brain a moment to realize that he was freeing himself from his breeches.

 _I did not know that Frost Giants even_ wore _breeches,_ she thought distractedly, flexing her fingers, which had begun to go slightly numb due to the force of his grip. _I did not know that Frost Giants could look like men, either. Handsome men._ It seemed as though that would have been a prudent warning to include in the stories, that monsters could appear beautiful.

Feeling uncharacteristically bold, perhaps due to her acceptance of the fact that she was not long for this world, she raised her hand and timidly traced her fingertips along his smooth cheeks, where she was _certain_ she had seen a pattern earlier. The Jötunn glanced back up at her face, an odd, surprisingly disarming expression crossing his features.

She had told herself to prepare for pain, and likely quite a lot of it, so it came as something of a shock that when he began to enter her, the sting and the discomfort of the intrusion was tempered by a flood of satisfaction, as if an ache was being soothed. Sighing heavily, he dropped his cheek to rest against hers, burying himself to the hilt. For a moment, he stilled, keeping her trapped and immobile beneath him as his fingers returned to her hair, twisting her head to the side to better access the delicate skin of her throat.

The tongue against her neck made her moan with frustration, and she fought to move beneath him. For his part, the creature seemed content to ignore her struggles, continuing his ministrations with an air of unhurried contentment. She dug her nails into his back, and she felt his lips curl into a smirk; it was then that she realized he’d been toying with her. Withdrawing almost entirely, he entered her again with one hard, decisive thrust, and she could not contain her cry.

 _“Delicious,”_ he taunted, his pace and his aggression slowly building, and while the rational side of her still feared that he may still plan to _eat_ her, some tiny, newly awoken part of her thrilled at his praise.

When his roaming hand eventually returned to her breast, the remainder of her worries were pushed to a dark recess in her mind, her desire and need rushing to the forefront. _“Oh,”_ she gasped, a heady rush overtaking her senses. “I feel- I do not-”

She abandoned whatever it was she’d been trying to tell him, too distracted by the building feeling of _something,_ something breathtaking.

He grunted, eyes glittering as his grip became nearly-painful. “I know,” he said. “I know what you feel. Cry out for me, little mortal. _Scream.”_

And she did. Burying her face against his neck and clinging to him for dear life, she rode out the waves that crashed over her, drowning in a flood of profound, bone-deep satisfaction. _Magic,_ she thought dazedly, her eyes fluttering closed. Such a thing was surely magic.

Groaning, the Jötunn tensed, spilling deep inside of her. He laughed breathlessly, pressing his lips to her brow in a surprising gesture of affection. “Not the kind of magic you’re thinking of, girl.” Realizing that either she’d spoken aloud or he’d read her mind, she flushed with embarrassment, her sense of contentment quickly evaporating.

She winced when he withdrew from her, a strange, profound sense of cold and loss curling through her as he stood and righted his clothing. Afraid of what was to come next, she lay petrified, starting in surprise when he tossed her shift onto the bed beside her.

“Dress yourself,” the creature said, crossing his arms and leaning against the table, a satisfied smirk plastered firmly across his features.

Fingers shaking, she did as he said, something akin to hope blooming in her chest; surely he would not bother with dressing her, would he, if he intended to kill her now?

“Come here.” She stood carefully, taking short, shaky steps towards where the Frost Giant stood beckoning. “You are a _good_ girl, aren’t you?” he said, absently toying with the rough neckline of her shift. “Such an _obedient_ little ambátt.”

He pulled her to the doorway by her collar, giving her a light shove out into the snow. The green light slid over his form once again, fearsome blue skin reappearing in its wake, making his bright grin stand out in sharp relief. “Run home to your master, girl. Tell your people that the eternal winter is coming. Tell them Loki Laufeyson comes to claim their mortal souls.”

Then he turned and walked away, the wind drowning out his laughter as he disappeared into the building storm.

The girl ran.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Since I haven't had the time or the steam to work on my slow-burns much lately, I decided to try my hand at a one-shot! Hope y'all enjoy!
> 
> This story is set in the Viking Age, and also during the Little Ice Age. Did the Little Ice Age come about because the Frost Giants were trying to take over Midgard? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Who can say? ;)
> 
> An ambátt was the female equivalent of a thrall - in other words, a slave or bondswoman.


End file.
